The Credibility, Completeness and Accuracy of Information about First Aid in Case of Choking on the Romanian Websites

Valentin NADASAN
Gheorghe VANCEA
Paula-Alina GEORGESCU
Monica TARCEA
Zoltan ABRAM

Keywords

first aid, choking, Heimlich maneuver, information quality, Internet

Abstract

A large number of studies assessing the quality of medical websites in various languages have shown that the quality of health related information is problematic. Nevertheless, the Romanian medical cyberspace has not yet been systematically evaluated. The goal of our study was to assess the credibility and content quality of information about first aid in case of choking intended for the general population on the Romanian websites. We evaluated a sample of 20 websites selected from the Google's first search results pages. The compliance to the credibility criteria was very low, the coverage of the topic was medium and the accuracy was good but we found frequent omission of important information about the first aid procedure for choking. Websites with high completeness and accuracy scores were rare, therefore, users should check several websites in order to get thoroughly and correctly informed about the topic.